“The business model that captures the essence will go further and smoother, otherwise it will keep trial and error.”

Text | Reporter Liang Xiao from China Entrepreneur

Editor | Mina

Cover photo | Zhao Yanben

Last year, Wang Wenli did at least two things that puzzled Ba Ma Tea Industry employees, and he himself was clear: “Many people might think this chairman is crazy?”

One was during a period of rapid growth in e-commerce, when he took action to suppress it—“too vulgar,” Wang Wenli criticized heavily at the time, even making two e-commerce department heads cry; the other was a heavy crackdown on franchisees’ price chaos, which immediately cost several million yuan.

Both incidents occurred at a critical moment when Ba Ma Tea Industry was rushing to list on the Hong Kong stock market.

Everyone—except Wang Wenli—worried that performance would be affected, and this worry soon became reality: after the adjustment, Ba Ma Tea Industry’s online sales performed poorly during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Coupled with other factors, in the first half of 2025, Ba Ma Tea Industry’s revenue and profit both declined year-on-year, and the stock price also suffered.

“It’s indeed very severe,” Wang Wenli admitted, but he didn’t care much: “I don’t care much about the data, I care more about the impact on the essence, in other words, as long as you grasp the essence, the final result will naturally be good.”

Wang Wenli Photography: Zhao Yanben

He firmly believes in this growth logic and hopes every Ba Ma employee can share this view. In his New Year speech, he specifically instructed the senior management team to read three sets of books—“Selected Works of Mao,” the “Positioning” series, and Drucker’s works—“read them over and over, and you’ll have different insights at different stages.” For example, “New Era Positioning” mentions three types of enterprise growth: muscle growth, fat growth, and tumor growth. “The previous growth of e-commerce was tumor growth; if not adjusted, it will definitely fail,” Wang Wenli said.

In his 33 years of entrepreneurship, he has seen many lamentable stories around him: some companies developed rapidly but then went astray—“either already in prison or on the way to prison”; others were large but suddenly collapsed. Wang Wenli gradually realized a life law of enterprises: “not in size, but in timing”—even if small now, as long as you walk the right path, don’t deviate or lose your way, and keep going, the goals you want will eventually gather, and the enterprise will naturally grow bigger.

This time, the law was once again validated. After a major adjustment, Ba Ma Tea Industry gradually resumed growth, with revenue increasing by 9.65% year-on-year in the second half of 2025, and annual revenue up by 2.5%. More importantly, this growth came from the “muscle” that Wang Wenli values most—core categories like oolong and black tea continued to grow over 7% year-on-year.

Ba Ma Tea Industry achieved its best performance in history, and in Wang Wenli’s view, this is just the beginning.

“Only Making Tea”

People often ask Wang Wenli, “Is Ba Ma Tea Industry mainly making tea?” Every time, he corrects seriously—no, it’s “only making tea.”

The answer can be traced back to the “Xin Ji” tea shop founded by Wang’s ancestors in 1856, and the sub-brand “Xin Ji Hao” launched later by Ba Ma Tea Industry originated from this. Wang Wenli’s grandfather and father were tea masters, and he himself is the 13th generation inheritor of Tieguanyin, also a national intangible cultural heritage representative—this certification is held by only 48 people nationwide in traditional tea categories.

“Bama’s tea garden.” Photography: Liang Xiao

Many employees of Ba Ma have experienced the “tea-making skills” of this chairman. Lin Jin Su, a product expert in Ba Ma’s oolong tea division, has been a tea master for 20 years. He can easily “smell” Ba Ma’s products among a few cups of tea, but he says, Wang Wenli is an absolute talent, able to remember every sip of tea.

A few years ago, Wang Wenli would join them, “every day as soon as I wake up, I come here to brew tea.” Tea masters often exchange skills and challenge each other. They deliberately “made things difficult” for Wang Wenli, adding 15% of a certain tea in the fourth brew, then another in the sixth, but he was never stumped.

“Nobody in the whole company knows tea better than me.” Wang Wenli, who claims he “doesn’t like to boast,” admits he is the best in this regard. But this is not just talent; it also comes from hard practice.

In 1993, Wang Wenli’s family founded Anxi Xiping Xiyuan Tea Factory (the predecessor of Ba Ma Tea Industry), mainly exporting to Japan, with high customer requirements, which pushed them to improve their skills greatly. At that time, Wang Wenli had just graduated from university, quit his job in Shenzhen, and returned to his hometown in Xiping, Anxi. He “moused around” in a small mountain village for over ten years, evaluating tea over 10 hours a day, repeatedly swallowing tea water to the point of damaging his oral mucosa.

Outside the mountains, the world had already changed rapidly. During those 10 years, Shenzhen’s GDP increased sixfold, and property prices in big cities surged. Wang Wenli’s son, Wang Kunhao, was very young when he heard from his family that they had many opportunities to invest in real estate in Xiamen, but Wang Wenli never had that thought; Wang Kunhao also remembers a funny story—Wang Wenli never bought stocks. The only time was when he was working in Shenzhen, and his family asked him to open an account. After buying a stock in 1992, he never touched it again until Ba Ma Tea Industry applied for a Hong Kong listing in 2025. The securities department later found that account, and an old yellowed note was later unearthed at the Anxi factory.

Wang Wenli has never felt regretful: “I always believe that if you really want to achieve something, you must focus. Many of my college classmates are smarter than me, following the trend after graduation, doing this and that, but in hindsight, none of those things grew big, and I’d rather keep doing this small tea business.”

To this day, his pleasure still revolves